Raleigh City Council approved changing the name of Aycock Street to Roanoke Park Drive on Tuesday. … Charles Aycock was a North Carolina governor and segregationist whose name also was removed from a building on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus in 2020.
“He was a North Carolina politician and state leader who was elected in 1900,” said Harry Watson, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor of history. … Watson said when Aycock was governor, he used racism, poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress poor Black and white people from voting.
“They said the only way to preserve white supremacy is to throw them out and vote Democratic, and that’s what happened,” he explained. A petition to change the street name was signed by 36 of 76 property owners in the area.